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Comment Re:Put 100s of millions out of work... (Score 1) 36

people on benefits always find constructive things to do with their time, they never get depressed due to lack of purpose and end up on drinks, drugs or in prison.

You're not thinking it through -- the goal isn't just to put everyone on benefits and make them spend the rest of their lives clicking the TV remote and waiting for their next welfare check. If you want to do it right (and the robots provide sufficient surplus resources to support it), you go a step further and hire people to do the job they always wanted to do, whether it makes a profit for anyone or not. If that means we have 100,000 ski instructors and 300,000 mediocre artists, then so be it; the robots do the grunt work, and the people are paid to do their preferred avocation.

Not that I expect that to actually happen, of course; in the event the robots actually can replace all labor, the upper classes will make sure that economic surplus goes to themselves, with only the absolute minimum getting distributed to anyone else.

Comment Re:NO! NO! NO! (Score 2) 36

We all know China is only competing successfully with us by using slave labor. Why would they need robots?

Honestly, they don't "need" robots or anything else; they could just keep doing what they've always done and hope for the best.

However, unlike some countries I could mention, the Chinese government has a vision of what it wants its future to be like, and is willing to work and invest to realize that vision. Hence robots, and other economic development.

Comment Re:Also, why can't ChatGPT control a robot? (Score 1) 100

There has been plenty of progress in using AI to control robotics; they use robotics-specific AIs for that, of course.

The fact that ChatGPT (or even LLMs in general) isn't particularly useful for robots shouldn't be a surprise, since robots (other than maybe C3PO) are about physical manipulation of objects, not about language generation.

Comment Re:It WILL Replace Them (Score 1) 45

Funny, today I was forced to deal with a phone tree system that wanted to hang up on me at any whiff of a plausible path to hang up.

Point being that even without LLM magic, they have already been making it supremely hard to get things done. The old standby of hitting zero or saying representative over and over again would not budge this system. I thought for sure when I got it to prompt for payment information and if I screwed that up, *surely* that would escalate to a human, surely they want my money. Nope, hung up when I failed to provide the payment info in a timely fashion either.

Comment Re:In other news: Lenovo is betting on AI (Score 1) 19

I'm saying they may not be given the same offers that the suppliers were formerly giving them. If a supplier sees that nVidia will absolutely buy a huge supply of memory, then they will demand a comparable commitment from other customers. They will divert capacity to the customers that are willing to make the biggest and most certain commitments.

So Lenovo may have had to commit to bigger orders, or just be left out of getting enough to keep shipping their systems at all. If supply is constrained *someone's* orders are getting delayed, and the bigger orders get priority.

To the extent it might be a gamble, it could be a very short term gamble. Companies try to adhere to 'just in time' supply chain and carry very little advance supply, since investors heavily penalize carrying any sort of inventory over time. So as one example put it, maybe they extended stock from 30 days to 45 days, assuming that the memory market won't get better for at least a couple of months, which may be what the suppliers are forecasting.

Comment Re:In other news: Lenovo is betting on AI (Score 1) 19

They might not have had a choice. The memory vendors getting sweetheart deals from AI supply chain might require other markets to increase their commitment or get nothing.

So the choices might be either stockpile or not have any supply at all for their mainstream product. It's worth a risk of overpaying for memory when you have no other viable option.

Comment Re:One potentially valuable thing... (Score 1) 25

Oh, for dialog it would suck. I'm thinking more about commanding 'sidekicks' to do certain things. Like voice command saying: "Bob, get up to that ledge (while pointing your crosshairs indicating the ledge) and provide cover with your sniper rifle". Today you can't direct non-human 'squad mates' with that level of specificity, so they do their specific scripted things or vaguely adjust their behavior in accordance to your vague command based on a press of a directional button. Natural language command of NPCs could open up possibilities to fix long-standing annoyances/limitations with NPCs trying to actively contribute to these situations.

For dialog, you lose the ability to be confident that the correct information has been conveyed to the player. So you can use it for background dialog for NPCs with no actionable info, but that dialog is going to be pretty pointless and particularly painful if it's hard to tell if an NPC is just background or has actual information for you.

Comment One potentially valuable thing... (Score 2) 25

Directing NPCs using natural language could enhance single player experience, where games have long sought to have NPC "sidekicks" and at best had to settle for very basic inputs in a real-time scenario "focus on my target, pick your target, form up, spread out" and even then it is generally making the input "too busy". These NPCs are a common source of frustration today, and if the gaming industry can't seem to give up on them, this could at least make them less infuriating... maybe...

Comment Re:Like GPU benchmarks (Score 4, Interesting) 38

Eventually? We are kind of already there. I recall some question on one of these going viral, attracting a lot of actual humans to write up why they felt the AIs struggled with it including answering in their writeups. So then their writeups made their way into the RAG inputs into LLMs and also into training material. The AIs suddenly got better at that question, what a surprise...

Just like most specific examples of LLM screwups get self-corrected in short order, automatically as the mocking ironically shapes the RAG component to avoid the specific behavior. Suddenly the LLMs got really good at counting the number of 'r's in strawberry, even as they couldn't actually count letters, but the internet now said how many rs were in strawberry just a whole bunch of times...

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